Good lord this is exciting, especially since by the sounds of it, writer Alice Cavender has chosen a first person approach which means Lucie lives, at least for the purposes of this "missing" adventure, past Doctor story or whatever you tend to call these things.

Of course ideally we'd have her back for some full cast audios but unlike other incarnations, Big Finish is understandably less interested in jumping around inside the Eighth Doctor's chronology preferring to move forward. Or so I thought. Take it away Nicholas:

"It’s great to have her returning to Big Finish, and, who knows, perhaps these great Short Trips readings will lead to Lucie making a full-cast return to us one day. There are, after all, many opportunities during her long story with the Eighth Doctor that give us a chance to revisit her era and insert new adventures. But I can confirm there are definitely no plans to reverse her fate in To The Death.'"

So that's already a done deal then isn't it? I can't imagine he'd mention it otherwise. So another boxed set coming Nick or individual releases? Same format as before?

Politics The concept seems like it's going to be a weapons grade WTF installation, but somewhere in here what we find is a cross between a Comic Relief campaign film and the BBC Three approach to explaining a complex issue. Really interesting piece of television.

"... the TNG episode “Tapestry” has both a consistent effect and a changing timeline. Q gives Picard the chance to go back to his youth and make better choices. Once Picard realizes his error (getting into the fight with the Nausicaan and getting stabbed in the heart was somehow the best outcome for him), he’s given the opportunity to restore his original choices. This time, as he’s stabbed through the heart, he laughs. Interestingly, it had been mentioned in a previous episode, “Samaritan Snare,” that he had laughed when stabbed—indicating that his experience in the past had always been a part of Picard’s history."

Why is this useful? Well, the licensing agreement with StudioCanal in particular means that there's plenty of European, notably French films which haven't had a theatrical release in the UK on the list featuring directors and stars which have had hits on our art house circuit.

Film Now that The Hobbit films have wrapped up, last month I decided it would be a good idea to slip straight into The Lord of the Rings trilogy in their extended edition. Not having my dvd copies to hand I thought I'd buy them on blu-ray instead.

There appeared to be two options.

The boxed set, which is the extended trilogy on blu-ray, but also the special features from the dvd version on repressings of the original dvds which I already own from buying the films ten years ago and nothing new. For £120.

Undaunted I bought the other two anyway on the assumption I might able to find the other in a shop.

Oh.

I could not find the other in a shop. Tried HMV. Tried That's Entertainment. Tried Fopp.

Fopp finally informed me that the disc was deleted two years ago, a fact which they seemed somewhat annoyed about because they had dozens of copies of the other two films which were practically unshiftable.

I've emailed the WB's publicity to ask them about this. We'll see. They tend to ignore my emails.

Film With a couple of X-Men related films in release this year I've decided to rewatch the previous releases in the only potentially sane way which is Wolverine consciousness order as explained in this earlier post.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men
X-Men 2
X-Men 3 (or whatever it's called in your end of the world)
The Wolverine
X-Men: Days of Future Past

As I said at the time, this leaves out X-Men: First Class and which I'd decided to tuck in after Origins.

Having entirely forgotten about the Xavier cameo and the business with Emma Frost in Origins and that it's set in the 70s, I really should have begun with First Class.

Except of course that this means that the cliffhangers from the end of that film don't get resolved until Days of Future Past. Except that you can't watch that before X-Men because it's both prequel, sequel and wipes out that continuity anyway and also reconfigures some of the continuity from the earlier X-Men films itself anyway.

So the ideal place for First Class is probably between The Wolverine and DoFP.

Except, when exactly are the younger Wolverine sections supposed to be set in relation to the continuity in Origins?

In other words, even though the Singer prequels have wiped the slate clean in terms of building the universe, thanks to Origins the whole business of watching the damn things in any kind of sensible order is still fucked.

Oh yes, I know, you could watch them in release order but with Origins released between X3 and The Wolverine, you're on a hiding to nothing.

In the end I've decided to watch First Class before DofP because ... shrugs.

When Sky’s deal for American Movie Classics' Mad Men kicked in between series, the programme lost three quarters of its UK audience as it switched from BBC Four to Sky Atlantic. By season six, Mad Men was pulling in 58,000 viewers. Those are the numbers you’d expect for a channel rotating listlessly through music videos in the afternoon.

It was later estimated that, given the high cost of acquiring Mad Men versus the number of people watching it, each viewer was costing Sky around £5 an episode.

He'll be unpleased to know that I recently succumbed and joined NowTV so I could finally catch up with some of these shows (Elementary) and watch others during broadcast (Agent Carter, Supergirl) having had to deal for years with the wait for a blu-ray release and then Lovefilm-By-Post to send them to me.

But you can imagine the moral quandary inherent what with my anti-Murdoch boycott. My key rationalisations for this Faustian pact is that I'm only spending birthday and Christmas money and buying NowTV boxes when they're discounted and utilising the vouchers which takes the cost of the service down to half price. Yes, I know. He gets you in the end.

"According to Tobman, who has worked with Beyoncé before, the challenge was to find a building in Los Angeles with a porch that resembled those found in New Orleans. Nothing like that appeared to exist, so the crew used the Fenyes Mansion, which houses the Pasadena Museum of History, and converted it into a Southern Gothic plantation. The property was an early site of film production in the region, first used by D.W. Griffith in 1912 for a film called When Kings Were the Law, later retitled The Necklace."

Film As we discussed recently, having access to three different streaming services and my own collection means I can't justify also receiving dvds from Lovefilm-by-post and so once they increase the monthly subscription price I'll be dropping it.

This is a big moment for me.

As this blog reminds me, I originally signed up for ScreenSelect on 29th February 2002.

Anyway, it was enough to indicate the benefits of not having to get a bus to the video shop and back and having access to a massive catalogue and I've used a dvd-by-post service continuously since, watching at least two to four dvds sent to me every week, a lifeline before broadband to a vast range of cinema.

It's quite a mixture and indeed there's a couple I'd forgotten I'd watched this early despite having carried out a boring diary project that year in which I kept a check on when and how I watched everything, a diligent process which often took hours of wracking my brain, information which is now recorded by streaming services as a matter of course.

My guess is I glanced through that month's Empire Magazine or some such. It's certainly the case that this will be the first time I've seen all of these films, yes, even The Third Man and the Three Colours Trilogy even at the age of thirty. Many of them went on to become favourite films, especially amongst the French New Wave.

In subsequent weeks I kept a record of my interaction with the service.

In May I was moaning about the post which had reduced to one delivery a day and was skipping the weekend altogether. Apparently I'd been getting through six films a week, which is huge. I suspect it's because ScreenSelect worked on a Saturday and would send a new disc out which would arrive at home on Monday and also the post office would do Sunday morning pick-ups at postboxes. Now if I post a disc on Friday it won't be turned around until Monday. Post it on Sunday and it won't get back to them until Tuesday. Sigh.By July I'd stopped watching television. That's pretty much still the case and now I don't even know when or where anything is broadcast. I completely missed the start of the new series of SHIELD.Then in November we cancelled Sky. Ironically, it's now the very fact of receiving Sky through an app on my Roku 3 box which has led to the decision to cancel Lovefilm.

Am I concerned? Yes. If enough of us do cancel in March when the price increases, Amazon might decide to cut their losses and close dvds by post which means it won't still be there should I decided to sign back up.

But free time is limited. The combined catalogues of Lovefilm, Amazon Prime and NowTV amounts to over six thousand items and even taking into account the dross and Disney repetition, that should be more than enough films and television installments to keep me busy especially with their rolling catalogues. Yes, I'll have to wait three to six months or longer after the shiny disc release to see some films, but at this point I barely pay attention to release dates anyway.

(1) As I said last time, this has led to Twitter feeling more like it used right at the beginning with wave upon wave of humanity chattering away about all the subjects under the sun apart from football and whatever else I have muted on Tweetdeck.

(ii) BUT having decided to follow all the people who work for an institution rather than the institution doesn't mean it's always possible to keep up with that institution's activities. Unsurprisingly people don't tend to talk about work outside of work and also aren't great at publicising their own writing and/or using social media in general. They assume, quite rightly, that an institution's official feed will do the job for them.

(c) The upshot of which is I've started following some institutional feeds again.

BUT the trick is to only follow those feeds you genuinely find useful rather than the scattershot approach of before. Just because you can follow the V&A feed, doesn't mean that you should if you don't live with a few hundred miles.

So the upshot of this experiment is that I just need to carry on experimenting.